‘Anyone who has spent time on the precariat rungs of the labour market is used to the pattern of excuses employers use to get out of paying you for work.’
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Labour MP Chuka Umunna didn’t set out to cause controversy when he advertised a student placement role in his office. Until the advert was picked up by the Graduate Fog website, which campaigns for fair internships and better treatment of graduates by employers, nobody thought there would be an issue. After all, while it’s Labour party policy to ban unpaid internships, “placement schemes” are different. Aren’t they?

The rationale seems to be that because such placements are part of a student’s education, they are different from internships and thus shouldn’t be subject to the same rules. Perhaps, in the best cases, placements can play the role that their advocates say they do. Making them unpaid, however, certainly puts temptation in an employer’s path.

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Ellen (not her real name), a 26-year-old from the north-east, says that her placement in a London gallery seemed to be little more than an attempt to sidestep the gallery’s “no unpaid interns” policy. “The work I was doing was pretty much what an intern would do, and everyone in the office referred to my placement as an internship and introduced me to people as ‘the intern’.”

Advocates of placements say that they provide invaluable experience and access to industry, and so it’s not really “working for free”. This is what they said about internships for decades. Anyone who has spent time on the precariat rungs of the labour market is used to the pattern of excuses employers use to get out of paying you for work. “Think of the exposure!” “It will look great on your CV!” “It will be an amazing experience!” Yeah, well, none of those things pay the rent.

Even these intangible benefits can be oversold. Ellen was told that, despite her placement experience, her master’s degree meant she was overqualified for the gallery’s apprentice programme. To make matters worse, some roles she could have applied for actively excluded people who had done placements or internships – ironically because of concerns about accessibility. “My whole degree I’d been told we had to be willing to work for free in the arts to have a chance at getting a job,” she said. “I’d taken on massive financial risk to do this placement unpaid, and now I was hearing that this experience, rather than helping, actually precluded me from being considered for even an entry-level role.”

‘The arts in particular have a long history of extracting unpaid labour from idealistic young people.’ Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

There is a pernicious assumption that careers in the media, arts or politics are desirable in their own right and so young people should have to demonstrate their commitment by giving their time for free. The arts in particular have a long history of extracting unpaid labour from idealistic young people. That such policies exclude those without the means to live without wages is obvious, and this is reflected in the lack of working-class representation in these sectors.

Jason, an international relations graduate, told me that he used to want to pursue a career in politics, but he was “financially frozen out” because, at the time, the only options available were unpaid internships of between three and six months. His parents lived outside London and didn’t have the means to support him for that long, so he ended up abandoning his ambition entirely, and now works in an industry that has nothing to do with his degree.

When he was applying for placements, the Brunel graduate Gavin Pearson told me: “I don’t think I’ve ever felt more like a ‘have-not’ in my life. Students who could afford unpaid placements not only got something I couldn’t achieve, but they could even apply for the paid ones that people like me needed to get.” Gavin was able to balance shift work around lectures during the regular academic year, but fitting in a full-time placement as well was simply untenable. “Food, rent and bills aren’t magically suspended for the duration of a placement, and there’s only so many hours in a week.”

Dr Matt Lodder, a lecturer in art history and American studies at the University of Essex, says he is worried that the education sector is being incentivised to create more placements regardless of whether or not they are paid. “I’m really proud that we’ve helped students from what’s euphemistically called ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds get placements,” he said. But “if they’re unpaid, as many are, then they can become a burden rather than a benefit in the immediate term”.

Lodder fears this may be causing a systemic problem. “Unpaid internships and placements can actually lower the need for certain kinds of institutions to hire people for exactly the kind of permanent entry-level jobs graduates are crying out for. The more universities help their students find unpaid placements, the fewer jobs there will be for recent graduates.”

The issue is not just restricted to “passion” careers like the arts or politics. Employers are picking up the habit of classifying training and experience as a replacement for a proper wage, a worrying shift towards conceptualising the job itself as a product the employer sells to the grateful employee. We need to recognise this is the “paradox of thrift” in action.

Economy-wide, our problem is that people don’t have enough money to spend. Everything you spend is someone else’s income, which they can then spend on goods and services to provide an income to others. While it’s cheaper to employ people for free, it also takes customers and demand out of the economy. Capitalism runs on sales, and you can’t sell things to people who haven’t got any money.

We need to get out of the habit of coming up with elaborate arguments for not paying young people for the work they do, and get back to understanding the fundamental importance of wages. Even if they’re young, even if they’re learning things, even if you never used to pay people in that role, paying people for the work they do should be recognised as a fundamental rule of the workplace. No more excuses.